


that medicine I need

by limerental



Category: The Witcher (TV), Wiedźmin | The Witcher - All Media Types
Genre: F/M, Gender Identity, Minor Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia/Jaskier | Dandelion/Yennefer of Vengerberg, Non-Binary Jaskier, Other, Trans Male Character, Trans Man Yennefer, implied polyamory
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-26
Updated: 2020-02-26
Packaged: 2021-02-28 01:09:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,618
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22915276
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/limerental/pseuds/limerental
Summary: ("But your courtly reputation?"she had asked when he revealed it, and he laughed, full-bodied."Oh Yennefer,”he said.”You of all people should know it takes more than just a stiff cock to inspire pleasure. I reach higher heights without than some men ever dare climb.”)Or a Jaskier who skirts the boundaries of gender helps Yennefer navigate some identity issues of her own.
Relationships: Jaskier | Dandelion/Yennefer z Vengerbergu | Yennefer of Vengerberg
Comments: 16
Kudos: 307





	that medicine I need

“It requires a sacrifice,” Yennefer says with a wry twist of her mouth. “I’ve already laid down everything worth giving.”

She flickers in the glowing light of the candles that clutter the stone floor, that sit on every flat surface of the room, lit one by one with a match lowered by a sure hand. Mundane, unnecessary, but she watches Jaskier’s fingers work without lifting her hand to coax the fire to life herself.

“It doesn’t,” says the bard as he presses the last flame to wick, then snuffs the match with the shake of a thin wrist. “You haven’t.”

 _What do you know?_ she wants to say, because he is human and frail and holds no power that can truly be useful here. She has long abandoned the notion that the man is _powerless_ , because he carries a kind of strength within him that even she sometimes envies. He can shift the mood of an ornery crowd with but a few lilting words and often knows things without being told, can deftly read between the lines and pluck out what is meant or conversely can obscure any close-felt thing into metaphor in an instant.

But here? She is still doubtful there is anything he has the power to do for her.

The dagger flicks in his hand, an ornate thing whose leather-wrapped pommel is fitted to his palm. Her eyes catch on the dull glint of the blade, not looking as out of place in the bard’s hand as it should. He holds it loosely, testing the edge with the meat of his thumb.

The cushion she kneels on does not fully blunt the cold, hard stone beneath her, and she wonders again why this couldn’t happen with less pomp and ceremony. But Jaskier is mostly nothing but pomp and ceremony down to his iron core. He thrills in the drama of her gaze following him as he sharpens the blade with long strokes.

The glow sinks his cheekbones into shadow, and he looks every bit like the man who has stolen across the Continent like a shadow, slipping in and out of bedchambers easy as a word lowered to a breath in a comely maiden’s ear. Dagger in hand, he also looks very much like the man who has followed in the footsteps of a Witcher, shirking danger at every other wood and knell and if opportunity arose, dancing to twist that little dagger into the meat of any man or beast that threatened him or his own.

But he is not a man. At least, not fully.

For this, he has stripped almost bare, a loose and translucent shift falling from his shoulders, flowing to his ankles and leaving no part of his body concealed. His skin is smooth and warmed by light, softened by a down of hair across his chest, his thighs, the round of his bottom. A man, yes, flat through the chest and angular enough, masculine where it matters, but the dip between his bent legs is as smooth and mounded as a woman’s.

( _"But your courtly reputation?"_ she had asked when he revealed it, and he laughed, full-bodied.

 _"Oh Yennefer,”_ he said. _”You of all people should know it takes more than just a stiff cock to inspire pleasure. I reach higher heights without than some men ever dare climb.”_ )

She thinks also that he is certainly no _woman_ , at least, not in most lights. Or at least, not unless he lets himself be. In the warmth of the candlelight, he dips in and out of the limitations of his body. He is curved and sinuous, he is unyielding and sharp.

Sharp now where the dagger rises from his hand but also in his grin, his focused gaze, his careful words.

“We can begin,” he says. “Any time you would like.”

“You are being needlessly mysterious about this,” she says but cannot quite still the twitching of her hands in her lap. She is dressed more modestly than he, a simple black dress that clutches her throat in a jeweled clasp, the silken fabric bare on her shoulders and back but concealing her chest, her belly, her folded legs. Her dark hair falls loose, tickling the bare line of her skin.

“It deserves weight,” he says. “It deserves to feel as monumental as it is. Do you want this, Yennefer?”

“I don’t have anything left to give. Nothing to sacrifice,” she insists. He steps through the line of cluttered candles, his shift fluttering dangerously but not catching aflame. His bare legs are delicate, feminine, the swing of his hips is a woman’s, the breadth of his shoulders and timbre of his voice is a man’s. The set of his jaw and gleam in his eyes does not belong to either, is something else entirely.

“Yennefer,” he says, and the hand not gripping the stout dagger lifts to touch her face, the line of her brow, the swell of her cheek. “Not everything has to be as difficult as you make it. Sometimes it can just _be_.”

( _”Which would you want?”_ he had asked in bed, his hand splayed across her stomach. _”If you could bear a child yourself?_ ” Beside her, Geralt lay a kiss to her bare shoulder. Swaddled between them knowing that Ciri slept soundly in the other room, it stung less, it faded sometimes. But not always. Not all the way.

“ _A boy,”_ she choked, and it ached, it swallowed her. _A boy-child who would never feel this pain she bore._ )

He steps behind her, his hand trailing into the line of her hair. Aware of the dagger as a whispering presence behind her ear, Yennefer goes still, perfectly so.

“What will it take?” she asks, does not let her voice tremble. “What do you ask of me?”

“Nothing,” he says, and his lips are on the top of her head, a brief touch that slips away as though it hadn’t happened. “Nothing, Yen, nothing. It’s already yours. You already are. You can just _be_.”

She thinks of the agony of transformation, of the hollow that still remained afterward, of the gnawing and clamoring pain that rose up despite it all inside of her belly. She remembers as a child, curled on the dusk of a pallet in the stinking barn where she slept, thinking _if I had been born different, if I were only something else, if I were not a girl, if I were not a girl_. She remembers, curled with her own blood dripping from her naked body, bones fresh-set and blazing, thinking _not enough, not enough, still not enough._

(When Jaskier had guessed it, he had looked at her, his parted mouth drawn to a round ‘o’ and said “ _oh my dear, oh darling, if you so badly wished not to be a woman, then I surely don’t think you ever were one_.)

The light of the candles before her begins to blur as, at her back, the bard gathers up the weight of her long hair in his fist. He is gentle, brushing with careful fingers the errant hairs that try to fall away from his hold.

“Is this what you want?” he asks with a soft cadence, barely rising above a whisper. “Do you trust it? Your sense of who you are?”

“No,” says Yennefer and his fingers loosen imperceptibly but of course, he can read what she is truly saying. “But yes. This is what I want. Do it.” _What I have always wanted._

The dagger sinks deep. 

It is messy, it is not the simplest way to do this, but there is an art and a drama to it that Yennefer understands then. He hasn’t done this for himself, the candles and the ceremony, but for _her_ who thinks it will have to be messy and swelling and melodramatic and awful. Transmutation has to be like this for her. It does not sing as sweetly as a bird and flit away and back again as easily as it does for Jaskier.

With quick strokes, the bard divests her of her shimmering length of raven hair, moves around her to work more carefully to trim and shape her anew. After a while, Yennefer closes her eyes, feels the tug of the blade, the slow hiss of it along the strands as he makes each cut.

“There we are,” he says at last. He is crouched before her, a silver hand-mirror tipped in his hands. Yen looks. The face of a familiar stranger rests there, hair shorn close to the scalp. “It will need some tidying,” he says. “In better light. But this is a beginning.” This is just symbolism. For Yen’s sake.

It’s a long moment before Yen notices the tears that shimmer along the cheeks of the face in the mirror, a gold sheen in the candlelight. Jaskier makes a low noise in his throat, stands to offer out a hand. 

He is ephemeral, shifting, in one breath a receptive curve, another a whetted blade. A vessel spilling and then the blunt shaft of a spear.

The offered hand is warm, a steady pulse beating there, and Yen rises to follow, legs quivering with a sudden loss of balance.

He steps carefully over the warm ripple of the lit candles to stand beside the bard. He looks back.

Within the circle rests a pile of soft hair, black as a shade, and he sees her for a moment, the woman that still kneels there. The woman he never was.

Yen mutters a small prayer as one would over a grave, and then, he turns from the huddled mass. He strides out through the open doorway. Shuts the door behind him.


End file.
